Between suburb and city: Conceptualising interplaces

A conceptual blind spot in prevailing models of metropolitan regions is how to understand urbanisation in secondary localities that evolve to be neither an ideal-typical suburb nor a city. This article foregrounds Nick Phelps’ notion of ‘interplaces’ to provide this missing link in our understanding of metropolisation. Interplaces are defined as localities which are situated in between the conventional conceptual and geographical boundaries of the city and the suburb that significantly shape the patterns of economic, political and cultural activity across the metropolitan region. Whereas existing research on interplaces has isolated categories such as post-suburbs and shadowed cities, we argue for a more structured and granular vocabulary that captures their full diversity and, in the process, reveal intermediary types such as the ‘metrotown’. Our novel framework categorises the variety of interplaces according to their different roles resulting from their partial and uneven spatial-functional, political-institutional and cultural-symbolic integration in the metropolitan region. The framework is illustrated by studying three interplaces in the metropolitan area of Brussels, Belgium. The analysis shows that while interplaces may defy easy categorisation, their hybrid, rapidly evolving and sometimes contradictory nature makes them central to understanding the materialisation of metropolitan regions at a larger spatial scale. In so doing, we lay the foundation for more context-sensitive urban theory and governance approaches that better reflect contemporary (sub)urban realities.